Thursday, August 9, 2012

Popular Culture and Violence

How harmful is our popular culture today? Some Koreans believe it to be
so detrimental to their children that they will only turn on the TV to
view certain programs, and strictly monitor its use by their children.
This is one way of dealing with the excesses of popular culture; the
wise of all cultures have reminded us to be ever watchful and critical
about what we see and hear, but critical thinking is not easily
achieved. Most of us will need help in making the right judgements on
how to interact with our culture.

In deciding what our children
can properly hear and see, we can be either too credulous or too
cynical. There are other ways than just restricting TV viewing to keep
the worst of popular culture from doing harm to the young.

A
columnist in the Korean Times brings up the pop song "She's Gone," made
famous by an older generation rock group and reintroduced recently by a
popular Korean rap combo. The
lyrics are about a man who loses his girl to another man and then kills
the
girl. The song was heard at a concert attended by 12,000 young people,
including middle school children. Along with the
music and the words, they saw the images of the violence and the
killing.

What was even more shocking was the 'bed performance'. And the majority
of the school girls, the columnist alleges, were following all of this
with enthusiastic cheers. A woman was being abused and then killed, and
yet the young women in the audience, judging by their response, were
enjoying it.

How culpable is the media in spreading this culture
of violence? he wonders. Violence in our society is continually being
given extensive coverage by the media. Very impressionable young people,
dissatisfied and exasperated with their lives, can easily use what they
see in the media to justify their own turn to violence to solve
personal problems. When a romantic relationship goes sour, there is no reason why it has to end in violence. The ever present and
sensationalizing coverage of violence in the media, the columnist
believes, gives our young people a reason to resort to violent measures
to achieve their desires, including, he suggests, the increase of date
violence.

Freedom of speech is an important right, but we should
not be oblivious of its negative aspects, and the harm it can do to our
society. In trying to change popular culture, it will serve us well to
know what we we are faced with and, with the help of public opinion, try
to minimize its harmful effects as much as possible.

He ends the
column by telling us to go to his blog, if anyone is interested in
seeing the video of "Girl's Gone," to see first-hand what he is talking
about: http://blog.daum.net/prolifecorpus.